Well, as predicted Obama won Oregon canceling out Clinton’s win in the similarly sized Kentucky. Meanwhile, I found this part of the Kentucky exit polls interesting. Obviously, given the extent of her win this didn’t alter the outcome, but it seems that a pretty hefty chunk of Clinton primary voters in that state don’t plan on voting for her in November — they just really, really, really don’t like Barack Obama.

Yesterday, Iraq War architect Douglas Feith spoke to the National Press Club to promote his book, “War and Decision,” and its revisionist description of the Bush administration’s pre-war planning.

At the event, Feith repeated his claim that the faulty intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was an “error,” not a lie. Additionally, he insisted that the U.S. had in fact found “a serious WMD threat” in Iraq:

While the failure to find presumed stockpiles of dangerous weapons “was catastrophic to our credibility,” he said, it was not a result of government deception.

“It was an honest error, not a lie,” he said. “Even if you correct for that error, what we found in Iraq was a serious WMD threat.“

In his book, Feith calls newspaper headlines stating that no weapons were found “fundamentally false,” and insists that the military found clear evidence of Saddam Hussein’s “intention” [his emphasis] to build weapons. A website he created to “disprove” myths about the pre-war planning states, “The Iraq Survey Group found that Saddam Hussein retained both the intention and the capability to revive bio-chemical weapons programs after sanctions were ended.”

The right wing seems unwilling to give up the belief in Iraq WMDs. In January, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) claimed the weapons were hidden like “Easter eggs” and moved to Jordan before the invasion. He also called it an “overreach” to say that just because we didn’t find them means they didn’t exist.

As late as April 2006, President Bush insisted WMDs existed in Iraq, despite having admitted two years earlier that “Iraq did not have the weapons that our intelligence believed were there.”

During a Senate appropriations subcommittee hearing today, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) asked Defense Secretary Robert Gates if President Bush is “correct when he says that it’s appeasement to talk to Iran?” While Gates tried to wiggle out of the question, saying “I don’t know exactly what the president said,” Specter took the opportunity to chide Bush for his comments he made recently to the Israeli parliament:

SPECTER: [I]t’s not appeasement, and that the analogy to Neville Chamberlain is wrong. And we’ve only got one government to deal with there. They [Iran] were receptive in 2003. I’ve had a chance to talk to the last three Iranian ambassadors to the U.N. And I think there is an opportunity for dialogue.

Watch it:

Specter noted that one day prior to Bush’s “appeasement” speech in Israel, Gates had said that the U.S needs to “sit down and talk with” Iran.

In an op-ed in the National Interest today, Brookings analyst Michael O’Hanlon responded to Salon’s Glenn Greenwald’s criticisms of his and the media’s often wrong portrayals of the Iraq war. O’Hanlon said that his work has “generally” been “proven right.”

O’Hanlon provided a “brief evaluation” of his “track record.” Continuing his penchant for inflating the grades of war supporters, he remarked: “Grading my own homework, I give myself a score of 7 out of 10. Whether that is a good or bad grade is in the mind of the beholder.” This self-praise, however, overlooks much of what O’Hanlon has written and said about Iraq over the years. A few highlights:

O’Hanlon today: “Prediction that the occupation/stabilization mission would be long and challenging: correct.”

– “The United States and coalition partners would win any future war to overthrow Saddam Hussein in a rapid and decisive fashion. This will not be another Vietnam or another Korea.” [9/25/02]

– “In all likelihood, the war will culminate in a battle for Baghdad starting anywhere from five days to two weeks after bombs begin to fall. The war could be over within a month. … the battle for Baghdad will almost surely not last more than a week or two.” [3/18/03]

O’Hanlon today: “I believe Ken Pollack and I have been generally proven right by events—especially since we did not overstate by arguing that Iraq was calm, or that a good outcome was within easy reach.”

– “Here’s why things are going well and why they will soon go even better.” [3/28/03]

– “I would say that the main surprise for me was probably that one could travel around the country, even flying over contested areas, with relatively confident sense of security. … [Y]ou’re talking about specific, isolated acts [of violence] just like you would get in an American city.” [9/28/03]

O’Hanlon said his belief in 2004 that a withdrawal “would help matters” was “probably wrong.” And in a classic “incompetence dodge,” O’Hanlon criticized President Bush: “It was very hard to realize how shoddy this preparation was, looking from the outside, but I wish I had dug deeper and pressed harder.”

In O’Hanlon’s eyes, a history of rosy assessments adds up to a “7 out of 10.” Ironically, he concluded the op-ed by recommending that journalists and analysts should “occasionally scrutiniz[e] one’s own work for accuracy, consistency, rigor and care.”

I’m just getting home from what I think qualifies as my first-ever event on the Washington cocktail party circuit (in a neighborhood so fancy I hadn’t realized it existed) and see Hillary Clinton’s on TV giving her victory speech from Kentucky. Somehow, I don’t see this speech turning things around and securing her the nomination. I get the sense watching her talk that she realizes this, though. A certain tension of the feisty underdog is gone — she’s smiling and having fun, talking about the issues that matter to her.

UPDATE: Okay, now she’s shifted back into campaign flim-flam. Apparently, Kentucky is the only state that counts and she’s talking tough about running all the way to the convention. I’m back to being disgusted by her, her staff, and her campaign and regret having said anything mildly positive above.

In an October, 2006 appearance on Fox News, James A. Baker, Secretary of State during the first Bush administration, emphatically challenged the notion that talking to adversaries constitutes “appeasement”:

BAKER: You don’t just talk to your friends, you talk to your enemies as well. Diplomacy involves talking to your enemies. You don’t reward your enemies necessarily by talking to them if you are tough and you know what you are doing. You don’t appease them. Talking to an enemy is not in my view appeasement.

Watch it:

While Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) recently said it is “naive and irresponsible” to talk to U.S. adversaries such as Iran, two months before Baker’s Fox appearance, McCain said Baker is “the smartest guy I know.”

Yesterday, Bush counselor Ed Gillespie sent an angry letter to NBC president Steve Capus demanding that the network run a correction for what he called the network’s “selective editing” of an interview with President Bush. NBC pointed out that the full interview “has been available, unedited, in its entirety, for the past day, on our website.”

Gillespie — and the rest of the right wing — was not mollified. Appearing on Glenn Beck’s radio show today, Gillespie continued to attack NBC. When Beck asked why conservatives continue to appear on the network, Gillespie replied, “It is beyond me frankly”:

BECK: While their [Fox News's] journalists clearly or their commentators are clearly conservative, nobody in Washington is trying to — the Democrats are trying to blackball Fox by not going on any debates, et cetera, et cetera. You don’t see Republicans doing that to NBC, do you?

GILLESPIE: No, and sometimes I question why. It is beyond me frankly.

Listen to it:

Gillespie’s attack seems nothing more than part of a coordinated right-wing smear against NBC — considering that the White House has misleadingly edited news reports itself. For example, in an effort to portray the surge as a success last November, the White House removed references about the lack of political progress in Iraq from an ABC News segment and distributed the edited version of the report “to government officials, Congressional staffers,” and journalists. Only after ABC complained, the White House “acknowledged it was inappropriate” and sent a revised version.

It is ironic that an administration that has planted false news stories at home and abroad — and set up a secret program to use supposedly independent military officials as Pentagon spokesmen — is now outraged over “the blurring of the lines” between news and spin.

In an interview with Fox News’s Neil Cavuto today, former Rhode Island senator Lincoln Chafee, who recently left the Republican Party to become an Independent and is supporter of Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), said “there are two John McCains”:

There’s one that was my colleague in the Senate that was good on the environment, that voted with me, the only other Republican to vote against the tax cuts, and had the Gang of 14. And now there’s the senator McCain that’s running for the Republican nomination. It’s almost like two people, kow-towing to the Republican base. And being a different candidate, and talking as he is now about how we need to not engage anybody on the world. … It’s a different John McCain, hearing the rhetoric I hear now. Make the tax cuts permanent and distancing himself from his environmental record.

Watch it:

On Fox & Friends this morning, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney added to Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) and President Bush’s attacks against Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) over his openness to engaging with the leaders of rogue states like Iran. Romney said that “without precondition, in his first year of office,” no president should “sit down” with leaders like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or former Russian President Vladimir Putin:

The question is should the president of the United States, without precondition, in his first year of office, sit down with Ahmadinejad, with Putin, Chavez, Kim Jong Il, with Assad, with the world’s worst actors, and the answer is, obviously, no. No president would suggest such a thing.

I think the only president that might be open to such an idea would be Jimmy Carter…

Watch it:

Romney’s inclusion of Putin in his list is odd, considering that in his first year in office, President Bush was more than “open to such an idea.” In fact, Bush met with Putin on June 16, 2001. After the meeting, Bush said that he “looked the man in the eye” and “was able to get a sense of his soul.”

Additionally, though Putin is now the Russia’s prime minister, he is no longer president. Presumably, the next U.S. president to hold talks with Russia will speak with the country’s new president, Dmitri Medvedev.

But Romney shouldn’t worry that his gaffe will lose him favor with McCain. Like Romney, understanding the nuance of other countries’ power structures doesn’t appear to be high on McCain’s priority list.